Thursday, May 24, 2012

The Social Story Experiment

Greetings carbon based lifeforms! And Chiira (Your chemistry is still being investigated.)

Nyambura , a dynamo of good ideas and even better writing shared about this site called http://www.kwirkly.com/ where a bright spark was putting out a bright idea each day. Idea number 12 resonated pretty strongly with me and I figured it would be something cool to do.

Start a crowd-source fictional story on Twitter edited & moderated by @Buggz79 where each Twitter user, after writing his/her part in 140 characters or less, mentions another person that continues the story. Each tweet is followed by a hashtag that allows the moderator to curate the whole story, which can later be downloaded free.

Ground Rules:

1. The hashtag is #WoteNdani

2. The story is in English. However, story characters can converse in any dialect they please

3. While the occasional expletive is fine, lets keep it PG13

4. Tagging: The person tagged to continue the story has 2 minutes in which to respond. If it takes longer than that, the moderator may reroute the story to another respondent

5. A person may be tagged multiple times. However, try to minimise this. Lets have as many people as possible participating.

*EDIT*

I've decided on a round robin approach. Basically, the story will flow in the order of the names below. This takes out the question about who's next in line and keeps the story fairly random!

Stuff I still haven't worked out:

1. How to determine that the story is complete. We could either do it time based or after a certain number of players.

2. How to ensure the maximum number of people who'd like to play get a shot. If we tag the wrong people, momentum will be lost with a whole lot of people asking "What's this about?"

The following people have expressed an interest in participating thus far:

7 comments:

By my count on your blog you have about 20 people so far, with 140 characters for the story's development. assuming all contribute once that would translate to 2800 characters and again assuming each word has an average of 4 letters that would make about 700 words so how about a 3500 to 5000 word limit? Unless you'd like it to become a novella... What do you think? Too many assumptions?

Should we dedicate all 140 characters in a tweet to the story, then use hashtag in following tweet? Or should we always include hashtag in story? (Which means we really have about 129 characters for story)

Is the time on Friday local Kenyan time? If so, it would be about 2AM here in Jamaica (shouldn't be a prob, just wanna confirm and I'll also set alarm)

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This is your afri-geek dude..technophile that truly and soulfully believes that tech and its potential to change lives in Africa. I've been on a journey to discover what my contribution to this reality is.